Research

A New Gold Standard for Early-Stage Cancer Diagnosis

Biomedical engineering assistant professor Randy Carney and his lab are on a mission to find new tools to diagnose very early-stage cancer. A new five-year, $2.5 million project funded by the NIH National Cancer Institute seeks to develop next-generation nanotechnology to identify traces of cancer in blood, saliva or sweat samples to find the disease earlier and save more lives.

EXPLORER Scans Cancer Patients

EXPLORER – the world’s first total-body PET scanner – has now been used to scan about 200 patients and 65 research subjects. Developed by Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, professors in the biomedical engineering department, EXPLORER can scan up to 40 times faster than current PET scanners along with a much lower dose of radiation.

Tan Lab Develops Tool for Tuning Cellular Noise

Cells are noisy entities. This noise manifests through the heterogeneity of protein synthesis and cellular behavior. Understanding and controlling the noise is paramount to various biomedical applications, including drug treatment, tissue engineering, and the design of synthetic cells.

UC Davis Engineers Respond to COVID-19 Challenges

Anticipating a scarcity of medical devices and a lack of treatment options for COVID-19, UC Davis College of Engineering researchers are investigating innovative technology to manufacture masks, ventilators and other critical equipment.

Look What’s Inside: Full-Body Movies From EXPLORER Scanner

Positron emission tomography, or PET scanning, a technique for tracing metabolic processes in the body, has been widely applied in clinical diagnosis and research spanning physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Fudan University, Shanghai, have shown how to use an advanced reconstruction method with an ultrasensitive total-body PET scanner to capture real-time videos of blood flow and heart function. The work paves the way for looking at the function of multiple organs, such as the brain and heart, at the same time.

Undergraduate Researchers Make Surprising Discovery in Mechanotransduction Research

Undergraduate researchers in the Yamada Lab discovered that when force is applied to a cell, a protein called cten is recruited to these fibrous structures. Since actin was long believed to be an important part of mechanotransduction, the UC Davis researchers inhibited actin to simply show that cten recruitment required actin. To their surprise, the mechano-sensitive response of cten was still present.

Job Opportunity: Louie Lab Seeks Postdoctoral Scholar

The Louie lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis is seeking motivated, intelligent, self-starters for postdoctoral positions that are part of an NIH project to develop targeted anticoagulants for treatment in atrial fibrillation.

UC Davis Researchers Strengthen Stem-Cell Transplants for Better Patient Outcomes

New cell-combination strategy creates longer transplant viability

UC Davis researchers have discovered a promising new way to use a combination of two types of stem cells to improve transplantation viability – and possible patient outcomes.

As outlined in Stem Cell Research & Therapy, the UC Davis team took on a long-standing challenge for stem-cell researchers: stem cells’ potentially short transplant lives.